Monday, April 01, 2013

Baseball Season

I railed about Runs Allowed last year, and I still maintain it will be key for the Red Sox. They won 69 games last year. They won't be worse, because they at least won't let in more runs. The back of the rotation in particular should be much less gruesome. Not necessarily good, just not disastrous. And we can hope all the spring-training optimism about Lester and Buchholz is justified, and they both go 16-10 or something. Bullpen unexciting but better. As for hitting, the Slugging Percentage should be worse, On-Base Percentage the same or better, for a net loss of a few runs.

It's hard to see more than another dozen victories out of all that. This is an 81-win team, that could creep up to 85 if they have few injuries and some players have unexpectedly good seasons. The jerk factor should be much improved, though, and even if the love is not restored this year, they should be able to position themselves for forgiveness soon.

2 comments:

Watching the season opener, I was just thrilled to see it looking like our team was actually having fun.

I know it's silly to care that we suddenly have a bunch of "clubhouse" guys, especially when we're paying "the Flying Hawaiian" $13 million dollars to hit maybe .250 with a .667 OPS. But seeing everyone smiling and congratulating each other did remind me how badly things had ended up last year, and that this team actually has a fair amount of talent and might be a contender for the playoffs if everything breaks right.

I told a co-worker in Feb that this team will win more than it loses, not much different than your estimate. We have to remember that, as bad as last year turned out, the team was in contention in July before the purge and collapse. Given that there does not appear to be a dominant team in the division, it should be interesting.